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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Most Americans
have heard John Brown’s name or know something about the attack on Harper’s
Ferry that made him famous. They may have seen John Steuart Curry’s mural
“Tragic Prelude,” which Curry painted for the Kansas statehouse, in which a
wild-eyed Brown with a flowing beard, arms outstretched, grasps a rifle in one
hand and a Bible in the other. Yet I think it is fair to say that even those
quite familiar with Brown have never encountered him as he is portrayed in
James McBride’s novel The Good Lord Bird, which won the National Book
Award in 2013. McBride’s historical and irreverently hilarious novel follows
the adventures of Henry Shackleford, a twelve-year-old slave in the Kansas Territory
when the novel begins, as he is sucked along in the wake of the abolitionist
firebrand who invaded Virginia in 1859 in a failed attempt to end the
institution of slavery. McBride’s novel is notable not only for its rollicking
narrative and youthful black narrator, but also for its depictions of Brown and
of slavery. To my knowledge, it is the only attempt by a novelist to portray
Brown from the perspective of one of the people he tried to free.

McBride’s
book is part of a larger resurgence of interest in Brown surrounding the one
hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, and his image has been
undergoing something of a renovation in recent years. In Midnight Rising (2011),
Tony Horowitz argues that Brown never seriously thought he would succeed in
sparking a slave rebellion, but planned his martyrdom with shrewd calculation
to provoke the war he thought was necessary to end slavery.In 2006, David S.
Reynolds published his massive ­biography of Brown, John Brown,
Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded
Civil Rights. Reynolds goes to great lengths to prove that Brown was not
only sane, but morally justified in light of the atrocities committed by pro-slavery
supporters and the atrocity of slavery itself. Just this year, after the
publication of McBride’s novel, theologian Ted A. Smith proposed in Weird
John Brown that Brown’s actions should be interpreted, and pardoned, as a
singular act of “divine violence” that served to expose the evils of slavery in
Brown’s time and still defies our attempts to pass moral judgement. Smith’s
book is perhaps the most innovative and eloquent answer to the poet Stephen
Vincent Benet’s question, posed in 1928, “You can weigh John Brown’s body well
enough, But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?”

All
of this hand wringing about Brown makes it a guilty pleasure to read McBride’s
depiction of him, which reminds us that it may be easier to remember John Brown
than it was to live with him. Henry Shackleford first meets John Brown in a
barber shop in Osowatomie, a small town on the Kansas-Missouri Border. In 1856,
the territory was descending into the chaos that would become known as
“Bleeding Kansas,” an orgy of violence that was ostensibly about whether the
territory would enter the Union as a slave or free state. According to Henry,
his mother is half white. His father is an enslaved barber who belongs to the
local merchant Dutch Henry. Brown enters the barbershop and summarily “frees”
Henry and his father (when Henry’s father hesitates, Brown snaps, “We’ve no
time to rationalize your thoughts of mental dependency, sir!”), kidnapping
Henry and in the process mistaking him for a girl. Brown’s mistaking Henry for
“Henrietta” sets up the central dynamic of the novel. The irony, of course, is
that Brown is so set on freeing “the slaves” that he doesn’t bother with
details such as whether Henry is a boy or girl or whether he wants to be free
or not. In fact, Henry spends most of the rest of the novel dressed as a girl
and trying to escape Brown, not slavery.

Through
Henry’s eyes, we get to know John Brown as a wildly idealistic religious
fanatic who could be both kind and brutal by turns. Brown spouts bible verses
in all situations and at the most inopportune times. “In all my 111 years,”
recalls Henry looking back, “I never knowed a man who could spout the Bible off
better than old John Brown.” His prayers could go on for hours. Brown’s
fanaticism is funny under normal circumstances, but McBride shows how the same
abstract obsession with slavery and the obliviousness to particular details
that caused Brown to mistake Henry for a girl could be terrifying as well. In
the real-life 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas, Brown and his sons hacked
five proslavery settlers to death with broadswords. In McBride’s novel, Henry
tells how Brown and his followers are lost, wandering through the Kansas
wilderness when they come upon a random cabin in a pro-slavery community. Brown
decides that this is where they will strike a blow for freedom, and when asked
why he replies, “I can smell slavery within it.” In an instant, and without
changing a bit, the bumbling abolitionist is transformed into a brutal
psychopath, a transition that shows the heart of our dilemma, and Henry’s, in
trying to explain John Brown.

Henry’s
view of slavery is one of the most interesting parts of McBride’s novel.
Slavery is just a fact of life for Henry. He doesn’t think slaveholders are
particularly bad or evil people. Certainly they are no worse than other people,
white or black. During the fight in the barbershop between Brown and Dutch
Henry, Henry says, “Now, I ought to say right here that my sympathies was with
Dutch. He weren’t a bad feller. Fact is, he took good care of me, Pa, my aunt
and uncle, and several Indian squaws, which he used for rootin’ tootin’
purpose.” After listing all the different things that Dutch had to take care
of, Henry says, “Fact is, looking back, Dutch Henry was something of a slave
himself.”

The
institution of slavery is treated throughout the novel as a thoroughly human
institution that could be brutal or relatively benign depending on the people
involved. Black and white, slave and free are not the most meaningful divisions
in Henry’s world. Instead, Henry narrates virtue and duplicity in both white
and black characters, slaves and masters. This is perhaps the most subtle but
central way in which the novel disagrees with John Brown himself, who thought
the institution of slavery so evil that he devoted his life to ending it, and
thought that slaveholders were so evil that God had appointed him as an
instrument to punish them. In contrast, at one point Henry observes, “Colored
turned tables on one another all the time in them days, just like white folks.
What difference does it make? One treachery ain’t no bigger than the other. The
white man put his treachery on paper. Niggers put theirs in their mouths. It’s
still the same evil.” In an interview about the book, McBride described his
novel’s humor as an “alternate way in” to talking about the historical reality
of difficult topics like slavery, which he described as “a web of
relationships, rather than the stereotypical thing of a white man whipping a
slave to death” (PBS Newshour, December 2, 2013).

This
is a provocative statement, but not a naïve
one. McBride is no newcomer to the complexities of race in America. A previous
memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (Penguin, 1995), told his story of growing up in the mid-twentieth-century
United States as the child of an interracial marriage. McBride’s desire to
capture the complexities of slavery is perhaps a reflection of this experience,
and certainly the voice of Henry Shackleford allows him to say things that
would be difficult to voice outside the pages of the novel. Without humor and
the youthful innocence that Henry brings to his story, it is difficult to
acknowledge, for instance, that there were conscientious slaveholders, that not
all slaves were revolutionaries, or that, as Henry observes, he never really knew
hardship and hunger until he was “freed” by John Brown.

At
the same time, McBride’s novel appears at a moment when historians are
reemphasizing the brutality of slavery in the United States. In his
just-published The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic, 2014), historian
Edward Baptist documents the massive increases in efficiency that masters wrung
out of slaves in American cotton fields in the Deep South over the first half
of the nineteenth century, mainly through methods that Baptist insists can only
be called torture. Thus, while Henry’s experience of slavery is entirely
plausible, other experiences of slavery are mostly off the page in McBride’s
novel. Humor as an “alternate way in” to history has its limits.

In
fact, McBride seems to realize those limits; there are one or two places in the
novel where a darker vision of slavery shows through the cracks in Henry’s
narrative. After escaping Brown for the first time and fleeing from Kansas to
Missouri, a slave state, Henry encounters Sibonia, a female slave who seems to
be modeled after the real-life slave rebel Nat Turner, who in 1831 led a failed
insurrection in Virginia that led to the deaths of fifty-odd whites and
hundreds of blacks. In contrast to Brown, Sibonia only pretends to be insane,
and during their first meeting she drops her pretense with Henry. Henry
recalls, “Her face was serious. Deadly. Her eyes glaring at me was strong and
calm as the clean barrel of a double-barreled shotgun boring down at my face.”
Sibonia is eventually found out and hung before she can put her plan into
action, but she dies defiantly, telling the next slave in line to the gallows
to “die like a man.” Sibonia’s desperation and grim resolve are evidence of a
side of slavery that young Henry has not seen and that exists mostly offstage
in McBride’s novel.

As
he attempts to do with slavery, McBride also takes the flat historical figure
of Brown and creates a full, rich, funny character that corresponds with the
historical persona of America’s original terrorist in unexpected, irreverent,
but delightfully believable ways. The descriptions often border on ridicule,
but as the novel draws to a close there is also an affection for the “old man”
that lies just beneath the surface. On the morning of the raid, as the wagons
carrying Brown as his men roll toward Harper’s Ferry and into history, Henry
delivers McBride’s best shot at explaining John Brown. Having spent most of the
novel believing Brown is insane, in the climactic moment Henry is overawed by
Brown’s commitment to his ideals. “The Old Man was a lunatic,” he recalls, “but
he was a good, kind lunatic, and he couldn’t no more be a sane man in his
transactions with his fellow white man than you and I can bark like a dog, for
he didn’t speak their language. He was a Bible man. A God man. Crazy as a
bedbug. Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at
least he knowed he was crazy. At least he knowed who he was. That’s more than I
could say for myself.”

After
reading this novel, it remains unclear whether humor is the best way to
understand the historical John Brown, let alone slavery. Even as an “alternate
way in,” humor can only be a beginning in the task of understanding the past.
But this may not be what McBride was after in his retelling of Brown’s story.
Humor and history are best understood as parallel ways of getting at the
inexpressible complexity of the human condition. Humor may not be a great way
to understand history, but it is often the only way to get at particular
experiences of being human. As an attempt to understand the historical John
Brown, The Good Lord Bird does not succeed any better than previous
attempts, but by using Brown’s story to humorously explore the human condition,
in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane, often
exist in such close proximity, McBride succeeds wonderfully.

Robert Elder is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University.